The seven victims were aged 12 and younger. The "systematic" and "shocking" child sex abuse crimes - committed by a group of women and men - took place over nearly a decade in Walsall and Wolverhampton
The 21 were jailed for over 190 years between them
A weapon designed to specifically maim and kill children.
Illegal under the Geneva Conventions for numerous reasons, including being disguised as an ordinary object, and being specifically targeted against civilians.
A War Crime of the highest order.
How will you continue your day after hearing that a father in Gaza, trapped beneath the rubble, begged rescuers not to save him?
Not because he had lost hope in life, but because he could hear his daughters’ final breaths beneath the debris. Their tiny hands were holding his in the darkness, as if pleading with him one last time. He was the father who had always been their safe refuge, yet this time he was powerless to pull them from the dust and shattered concrete.
Only his head was visible above the wreckage. He looked into the eyes of the rescuers, his own eyes exhausted by fear and helplessness, and said:
“Leave me… my daughters are here… I do not want to come out alone.”
What heart can bear such a scene? What language can describe the agony of a father who realizes he is losing his daughters one by one, while still holding their hands until they grow cold, unable to offer rescue or even one final embrace?
How will your day go on after knowing this story? How will you sit at your table in peace, or laugh at something trivial, knowing that somewhere there was a father whose last wish was not to survive alone?
And the question that continues to haunt the human conscience remains:
How much pain must the world witness before it finally hears the cry of a single father there?
A Nigerian migrant on his way home from work in Belfast is approached by the far right, who question him about being in Northern Ireland.
“Who told you to come to our country? You F……g n……s need to go home!”
“You banana eater.”
When is enough enough?
It's pretty disgraceful that there has been absolutely no mention of this from the Prime Minister.
It's increasingly clear that some attacks, correctly, warrant disgust, emergency measures and days of media coverage.
Others seem to be met with silence.
The world's first trillionaire is backing the far right mobs and their politician backers.
Don't think for a second that these men have ordinary people's interests at heart.
From Southport to Belfast, we keep seeing the same pattern: a terrible crime, followed by racist mobs attacking black and brown people who had nothing to do with it.
These are pogroms.
The politicians and media figures who spent years demonising migrants and inflaming racial hatred have blood on their hands.
We must stand together against this hatred and organise against this fascism.
New York City is 9% Muslim and has a Muslim mayor, which scares a lot of people, most of whom don't live here. This afternoon on the train ride home (air-conditioned, thank god), I see an Arab-looking girl in a headscarf and a long, conservative dress chatting animatedly with her friend, a Chinese-American girl (New York is 15% Asian) in shorts and a tank top. As far as I can tell, neither one of them mentions Sharia or jihad; instead, they seem to be looking at pictures and arguing about which boy (I assume) looks cutest. They address each other as "bro." A Caribbean woman enters the car, chatting on her phone. She is heavyset and middle-aged, with dyed orange hair. She sits down and gets off the phone as the train leaves the station. Next stop, another middle-aged black woman, more conservatively dressed, sits down next to her. She's reading "Kin" by Tayari Jones (an Oprah Book Club recommendation). (New York is 20% black, about 1/3 of those from the Caribbean.) At the same time, a white father and daughter come in. People scrunch aside so they can sit together. He starts to read a picture book to her, but after a bit, she insists she can read on her own. He pulls out his own book. (New York is 31% non-Hispanic white.) A few stops later, a Hispanic man gets on the train with a guitar. Oh no! But it turns out he's pretty good (often not the case), I enjoy his plaintive ballads about love or something. I give him a dollar, and he says "Gracias." (New York is 29% Hispanic.) There's one annoying drunk dude, an older white guy. I assume he's drunk and not crazy or homeless because his clothes are nice and he's clutching a phone, but he seems on the verge of passing out, repeatedly bending over slowly until another lurch of the train wakes him up and he straightens. The dad with the daughter looks alert and peeved. Understandably! I get out at my stop, along with the drunk guy, but I take a different set of stairs to avoid dealing with him. Then a short walk from the station in the sweltering heat, with a brief stop at my Yemeni bodega (more Muslims!). Finally, I pass a Cuban-run barbershop with no one getting a haircut, and a couple sitting outside (the owners, I assume) listening to salsa. I get home and turn on the damn AC, safe once more from assault and/or bad serenades.
In a frightening hate incident, a man wearing a balaclava attempts to burn down a local Imam's home in Bolton, with his young family inside.
The perpetrator is still at large.
Trying to imagine the response from the British political class if it was another minority faith community who were locked inside their place of worship as bigots threatened them.
But it’s Muslims… so… who cares!
Palantir's co-founder claimed "the NHS makes people sick".
Yet this US tech giant now runs the NHS data platform.
There are serious concerns about its access to patient data and human rights record.
The Government should use the break clause to kick Palantir out of our NHS.
Jeremy Vine: "This doesn't feel like the kind of crime we saw before mass immigration."
Radzi: 84% of murders committed by UK-born.
The media knows the stats. They just don't want you to.
Pick a villain. Ignore the truth. That's the game. 🎯📺
Good to know where the attacker is from. Then, we as a society can whip up racist hate against Sudanese migrants whilst ignoring the two murders a week of women by white men in the UK because the issue isn’t men in general, it’s only those foreign men who are murderous animals.
Belfast riots : Immigrant family rescued by Police after rioters set their house and car on fire while the family was still inside.
This is an attempted murder.
Those poor kids will live that trauma.
‘Behind the “guy with a pint in the pub”, this is a man who consistently voted against the interests of working people.’
Trade Union Head Paul Nowak tells @AndrewMarr9 he finds Reform's 'party for the working class' image 'laughable'.
Call you old fashioned? Alright, old-fashioned, @PatrickChristys, let us go through the decades you prefer.
The 1960s: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley tortured and murdered five children, buried them on Saddleworth Moor, and recorded their screams on tape.
The 1970s: Peter Sutcliffe murdered 13 women with hammers and screwdrivers across Yorkshire.
Dennis Nilsen began strangling young men in his London flat, dismembering them, boiling their skulls on his stove, and flushing the remains down the drains.
The 1980s: Michael Ryan shot 16 people dead in Hungerford. Fred and Rose West were raping, torturing, and dismembering women and girls and burying them under their house in Gloucester. Their own daughter among them.
The 1990s: Two 10-year-old boys abducted a toddler from a shopping centre in Liverpool, tortured him, and bludgeoned him to death with bricks and an iron bar.
Thomas Hamilton walked into a primary school in Dunblane and shot 16 five-year-olds and their teacher. Harold Shipman was murdering his patients by the hundred.
The 2000s: James Watt and his family enslaved a man for a decade, tortured him with baseball bats, air pistols, boiling water, and pit bull attacks, then decapitated him and dumped his body in a lake.
Mathew Hardman, 17, murdered a 90-year-old woman, cut out her heart, placed it on a silver platter, and drank her blood.
The 2010s: Derrick Bird shot 12 people dead across Cumbria.
Thomas Mair shot and stabbed an MP in the street while shouting "Britain first".
The 2020s: Jemma Mitchell decapitated her friend, stored the body for two weeks, and drove 200 miles to dump it.
Those are the decades you prefer. And for each decade there are 20 other equally horrific incidents.
And here is the thing, old fashioned Patrick. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, violence, burglary, and car crime have fallen by close to 90% since the mid-1990s. The ONS confirms that violent crime is two-thirds lower now than in the 1990s.
The country you live in today is measurably, statistically, dramatically safer than the one you are nostalgic for. That's not an opinion, it's a fact.
And I am not even touching Glasgow and its past knife crime epidemic.
So, which decade was better, Patrick? Tell us.
Zack Davies walked into a Tesco in Mold in 2015 and attacked Dr Sarandev Bhambra with a machete and a claw hammer while shouting "white power".
Cut to the scalp down to the bone. Left hand nearly severed. Five hours of surgery. Davies tried to behead him.
Nazi flags and Combat 18 stickers at his home. Life sentence.
In public. In a supermarket. In broad daylight.
You were saying?
Israeli soldiers shot a 7 month old baby dead.
They then lied about it.
This is what the Israeli state does.
They commit war crimes, lie about it, commit more war crimes, lie about it, in an endless cycle of murderous horror.